Sandra Belloni — Volume 1 eBook

Forthwith she stript the harp half bare, and throwing
a propitiatory bright glance at her audience on the
other side of her, she commenced thrumming a kind
of Giles Scroggins, native British, beer-begotten air,
while Jim smeared his mouth and grinned, as one who
sees his love dragged into public view, and is not
the man to be ashamed of her, though he hopes you
will hardly put him to the trial.

“This is his favourite tune, that he taught
me,” she emphasized to the company. “I
play to him every night, for a finish; and then he
takes care not to knock my poor harp to pieces and
tumble about.”

The gentlemen were amused by the Giles Scroggins air,
which she had delivered with a sufficient sense of
its lumping fun and leg-for-leg jollity, and they
laughed and applauded; but the ladies were silent after
the performance, until the moment came to thank her
for the entertainment she had afforded them:
and then they broke into gentle smiles, and trusted
they might have the pleasure of hearing her another
night.

“Oh! just as often and as much as you like,”
she said, and first held her hand to Arabella, next
to Cornelia, and then to Adela. She seemed to
be hesitating before the gentlemen, and when Wilfrid
raised his hat, she was put to some confusion, and
bowed rather awkwardly, and retired.

“Good night, miss!” called Mr. Pericles.

“Good night, sir!” she answered from a
little distance, and they could see that she was there
emboldened to drop a proper curtsey in accompaniment.

Then the ladies stood together and talked of her,
not with absolute enthusiasm. For, “Was
it not divine?” said Adela; and Cornelia asked
her if she meant the last piece; and, “Oh, gracious!
not that!” Adela exclaimed. And then it
was discovered how their common observation had fastened
on the boot-lace; and this vagrant article became the
key to certain speculations on her condition and character.

“Has she sentiment for what she sings? or is
it only faculty?” Cornelia put it to Mr. Sumner.

That gentleman faintly defended the stranger for the
intrusion of the bumpkin tune. “She did
it so well!” he said.

“I complain that she did it too well,”
uttered Cornelia, whose use of emphasis customarily
implied that the argument remained with her.

Talking in this manner, and leisurely marching homeward,
they were startled to hear Mr. Pericles, who had wrapped
himself impenetrably in the bear, burst from his cogitation
suddenly to cry out, in his harshest foreign accent:
“Yeaz!” And thereupon he threw open the
folds, and laid out a forefinger, and delivered himself:
“I am made my mind! I send her abroad
to ze Academie for one, two, tree year. She shall
be instructed as was not before. Zen a noise
at La Scala. No—­Paris! No—­London!
She shall astonish London fairst.—­Yez! if
I take a theatre! Yez! if I buy a newspaper!
Yez! if I pay feefty-sossand pound!”